Brave people wear white shoes. Beyond being a timeless look that transcends pesky fashion trends, it’s a testimony to either relentless ignorance, or the full embrace of Paradox.
Either way, both are the entry points to wisdom – a virtuous wisdom that enables us with existential courage: the courage to exist as fully as you truthfully are.
In this article, we’ll meditate on the principle of paradox, how paradox relates to grief, how Socrates became the wisest man of Athens, and why I vow to only wear white shoes for the rest of my life.
Paradox is that artesian well of meaning we need so badly in our modern world. All the great myths give instructions on this subject and remind us that the treasure will be found in one of the least likely or popular places.
– Robert A. Johnson, excerpt from Owning Your Shadow
How opposition leads to contradiction
Life is an ever-evolving dance of opposing elements: Warmth opposes cold, love opposes indifference. Day opposes night, life opposes death, etc. Within these oppositions, we tend to prefer the positive over the negative. We like to be comfortable, to be warm, to be joyful, to live a Sims life. Anything that threatens our preferred opposite should be avoided at all cost.
The problem with this way of thinking is that “in that refusal we only confine ourselves to the useless experience of contradiction”, Johnson writes in his book Owning Your Shadow.
Contradiction, in this context, happens when our refusal of the negative side of an element, complicates the element itself. Mainly because the experience can only exist in its entirety, not just partially.
Below are examples of what such useless contradictions look like:
In each example, the former cannot exist without the latter. The central question now is how we deal with such contradiction, a thing not often considered yet vitally important to reflect on, as it heavily influences the way you live your life.
Because here’s the truth we often wish to avoid: we won’t find wisdom without being naïve. We’ll never experience growth without sacrifice. No object, item, desire, or person exists without its shadow counterpart.
If we believe otherwise, we condemn ourselves into contradiction, which leads to stagnation, procrastination, existential crisis, or to a lesser version of what we actually could be.
Writing this, I recall the moment I lost my dad to cancer. I was 21 at the time, and to see a loved one suffer like that only made me want to stand still. After he was gone, there was nothing but a desire to only stand still for awhile.
My dad’s passing created a disconnect in my heart, one that was only resolved after a shift in the way I perceived his absence. A shift that rekindled my world’s saturation, that enabled the good memories to exist over the bad ones, allowing him to live inside my heart ever since.
To understand how that shift happened, we’ll first look at how Socrates was crowned as the wisest man of Athens.
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Socrates and the paradox of wisdom
When Chaerephon, an old friend of Socrates, went to the Oracle of Delphi, he asked whether anyone was more wise than Socrates. “No one is wiser”, the oracle replied.
When Socrates heard of this news, he couldn’t believe his ears. There was simply so much that he didn’t know! Surely, there must be wiser men roaming the streets of Athens… but, the oracle surely couldn’t be lying?
And so, Socrates went out on a quest to investigate the oracle’s claims. He visited some of the most brilliant minds who claimed to possess wisdom, asking them life’s most difficult questions. But to his disappointment, Socrates didn’t find wise men; he only found men incapable of seeing their own ignorance.
In his finding, it came to Socrates that perhaps, the Oracle had declared him the wisest of Athens, precisely because he acknowledged the limitations of his wisdom. On the scale of ignorance and wisdom, he accepted the full scale, instead of only a part of it.
Thus, he was declared the wisest man of Athens, signifying the power of paradox – the paradox that true wisdom lies in the recognition of one’s own ignorance.
Shifting Contradiction into Paradox
As we see in the story of Socrates, the embrace of paradox liberates us from the chains of contradiction: there can be no wisdom without not-knowing. Likewise, there can be no life without death. Acknowledging this paradox transformed the way I grieve, realising my dad could only be as present as he was in my life, precisely because of his current absence.
No thing can exist without its shadow side. To wish or believe otherwise is to create a painful contradiction that disconnects the heart from the present moment.
To embrace Paradox this way, opposites become complementary to each other, instead of contradicting one another. By embracing paradox, we create balance within ourselves, and start the process of personal metamorphosis. Negative experience becomes complementary to positive ones, and we enable ourselves to face any situation with a sense of existential courage – the courage to exist as fully as you truthfully are, in spite of life’s opposites.
To fall in love with Paradox
So why do brave people wear white shoes? Because they’ve stopped refusing the shit that comes with the good.
White shoes are worn by either somebody who doesn’t know what they signed up for, or by an apprentice of embraced paradox suffering the constant effort of appreciating life’s opposites, no matter how contradicting they get.
Such an apprenticeship enables us to experience the upsides of life, and simultaneously gives a sense of equanimity when shit hits the existential fan. You’ll do your life’s work in spite of fear, you’ll align with your highest Self in spite of sacrifice, you’ll come to understand that a pair of white Nikes is mesmerisingly fresh, precisely because they’re light brown and reek of shit at other times.
P.S.: from this article onward, I vow to only wear white shoes for the rest of my life!
